Monday, February 20, 2006

Some interesting figures

I read a few interesting figures recently and here they are.

There was a survey done and one of the questions was how much have dividends/payouts contributed to overall stock returns. The average answer was 5-20% of total overall stock returns. The return contributed to dividends is actually around 65% and this assumes compounding of the invested dividends. Even if you take out the effects of compounding, payouts still count for 40% of the total return.

Within the last twenty years or so, dividend paying stocks have outperformend non-dividend paying stocks by almost 8%.

This next part is from the Wall St Journal (from a few weeks ago).One dollar invested in the S&P from 1926 to 2005 would be worth about $2655. This figure goes down drastically if you remove the effects of inflation, taxes, and trading costs. The same dollar would only be worth $46.59

In other news, my net worth is having a tough month. I've increased it by about $500 so far (with one more paycheck to go), but I had to deal with a few big expenses. Why does it seem that when I was in college I didn't have these big expenses, and now I have to deal with getting new tires and fixing my car? I also planned a small trip for March.